Hello, i am sorry for my bad english, i am a french student in Paris Université Pierre et Marie Curie. First i precise my post is not a controversial one, i am reading "Récoltes et Semailles" by Alexandre Grothendieck, according to him Deligne is a great mathematician but he is also a plagiarist and i want to know an other point of view. Must Grothendieck's talk be moderated ? Is it just wrong ?

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In my opnion, this is not an appropriate question for MO, and it will not be appropriate to try to asnwer it.
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Gil KalaiFeb 23 '10 at 22:27

I don't see any harm in this sort of question.
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Kevin WalkerFeb 23 '10 at 22:48

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I think that the question is okay, and of potential interest as history of mathematics, provided that we try to keep the discussion objective.
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Greg KuperbergFeb 23 '10 at 23:04

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I am slightly torn on this, since I don't want blanket discouragement of attempts to discuss the history of mathematics; but I do feel that this particular discussion would generate more heat than light, or more hearsay than analysis. So I'm voting to close.
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Yemon ChoiFeb 23 '10 at 23:30

1 Answer
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The source of your quote, I believe, is the 1978 article that Tate and Mazur wrote in Science. They gave a surprisingly readable description of Deligne's work on the final Weil Conjecture (so called "congruent Riemann Hypothesis" ). An interesting comment in that article is that Deligne asked one of his school teachers about mathematics and the teacher gave him (at the age of 13 or 14) the first several volumes of Bourbaki; apparently this was Deligne's first introduction to "higher" mathematics. Quite remarkable.

I would also like to comment on Regenbogen's deleted answer (visible to users with 10k+ points): that very long article was self-published and not at all vetted. A number of people have called into question the author's assertions or the accuracy of his memory. Caveat lector.
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Todd Trimble♦Sep 16 '12 at 19:21